Review: ‘We Are King,’ With Its Deep R&B Strategies, Is a Musicians’ Album

King

King is a tribute band, in a way, but not to one artist’s work. It’s three women channeling a specific spirit and a method of romantic, introspective, positive and harmonically sophisticated R&B.

That might not sound like a high priority, if your understanding of the value of current R&B is predicated on how well it subverts or reframes its roots — as singers from many strata of pop have been doing, from Kelela and Dev Hynes to Drake and his heirs. So it helps actually to hear “We Are King,” the band’s first full record after a 2011 EP, and let its details work on you a bit. I mean all of it: This is a record that works in aggregate and assumes that you have time.

Even in its gentleness, with mildly Afro-futuristic lyrics about journeys and persistence and love, “We Are King” is pretty stubborn. It isn’t making a leaner, blurrier or more gratification-delaying R&B — it gratifies from beginning to end — nor is it annexing hip-hop’s beats or essences. It’s not a provocation on the ramparts of contemporary aesthetics; it’s not a 2016 revision of R&B, particularly. It’s a musicians’ album, going deeper into the strategies of a strain of R&B that might begin with Stevie Wonder’s “Music of My Mind” (1972) and continue through Patrice Rushen’s “Straight From the Heart” (1982), as well as any number of Prince ballads and Luther Vandross party songs.

Given all that, I’m not sure how the record manages to evade the feeling of fetishizing the past. (The members of King — the twin sisters Paris and Amber Strother, and Anita Bias — wrote and produced the album, with Paris playing all the instruments, except for guitar and horns. But self-producing artists can be fetishizers, too.) Part of it has to do with hard work: stirring chord changes, analog synthesizers, bits of jazz and gospel, luxurious slow tempos and hypnosis built through a refrain over bulbous synth tones, as they do in “The Right One” and “Supernatural” and “The Story.” But part of it must have to do with their intent. King seems trend-agnostic: making music that isn’t demonstrably new, but doing it in a way that isn’t demonstrably old.

Correction:

The New Music column on Thursday, which included a review of the album “We Are King,” misstated the given name of one of the twin sisters in the group King. She is Amber Strother, not Anita.

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